One of the consequences of moving here meant that we had to go from a detatched house to an apartment. While I know that the annoyances in my life would be blessings to the rest of the world, I just can’t stop hating the fact that we have to share laundry facilities.
The machines here steal my quarters, make lots of noise, break regularly, have limited capacity, and don’t dry very well. Also, at peak times, the room fills up and people forget to take their clothes out of the dryers. After waiting a while, I sometimes have to unload the dryer onto the counter, and that just creeps me out — I don’t want strangers touching my stuff so doing it to someone else is just wrong. But of course when I leave my clothes in the dryer for 15 minutes too long on a busy night, all my unmentionables are spread out all over the counter, and of course they’re still damp.
Today was the icing on the cake, though. I left one of my empty laundry bins in front of the dryers while I took the full one back down the hall. I told the other family that was getting ready to put their clothes in the dryer that the one I had just unloaded worked the best, but there was a language barrier. The dad guy did start checking it out, though. When I returned, they were gone, they’d put their clothes in a different dryer, and there was a mess all over the floor. Their infant had spit up, and of course some of it went into my bin. It didn’t have any clothes in it, but still. It was disgusting. I was raging mad and uttered some choice phrases. I seriously thought about using their clothes to clean the stuff out of my bin and then putting them back in their dryer. I didn’t, though; I know the Karmic Boomerang is a bitch and I didn’t want to sink any lower than I already have. I’m still seething a little bit four hours later, though. There was enough on the floor they had to have noticed and probably supervised the Exorcist reinterpretation. Did they magically think I wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t be bothered by the chunks their baby blew? I went back half an hour later to see if I’d forgotten something and the sick was still all over the floor so it’s not like they just hadn’t gotten to coming back to tidy up.
Living in an apartment is probably the “right” thing to do — I’m much closer to work than I would be if I tried to get a house here and we don’t really need all that extra space. But there are times when I’d kill to not see people fill up the recycling cans with ordinary trash, to have ignorant people or self-absorbed wankers steal our parking places, or to skip scrounging quarters and fight for a washer.